PG&E’s competitive dark fiber ambitions stall at CPUC

Update: PG&E filed a request with the CPUC, asking to withdraw its application to become a certified, competitive telecoms company. More tomorrow.

It’s been more than 15 months since Pacific Gas and Electric asked for permission to get into the dark fiber business in a big way. In April 2017, it asked the California Public Utilities Commission to certify it as a telecoms company, which would allow it to lease its surplus dark fiber to commercial customers. It’s already in the dark fiber business, but it’s limited to leasing capacity to service providers that are already certified.

As is common practice, potential competitors and so-called consumer advocates jumped into the middle of the CPUC’s review – intervened, as its called. Instead of managing its own process, the CPUC was content to let these intervenors dicker with PG&E. It wasn’t productive. I attended a couple of those sessions as an observer – my clients include municipal electric utilities with fiber interests – and wasn’t impressed by the quality of the conversation. Now, those talks have broken down and everything was tossed back into the lap of the CPUC administrative law judge who currently has the ball (it’s been passed around a bit).

Despite the good faith effort of the Parties, it became clear that an agreement would not be reached on any of the issues and all settlement discussions ended on July 30, 2018…the Parties no longer believe that settlement will be reached on any of the issues in this proceeding.

Now, the ALJ hearing the case is asking PG&E to answer several pertinent questions about its quest to add telecoms to its portfolio. That would have been a fine thing to do a year ago.

We’ve already seen Southern California Edison’s fiber deal with Verizon collapse this year, due to the CPUC’s needlessly complicated process, and the misguided efforts of competitors, advocates and a CPUC commissioner to extract benefits, public or otherwise, from it. It would be a tragedy for Californian consumers – who need affordable broadband access as much as they need electricity – if PG&E’s bid to make the northern California telecoms market more competitive also fails.